LORDS OF SMASHMOUTH

Baskin, with co-author O’Bryant, offers a history of Ohio State University’s football team and its culture.

The chronicle of the famed OSU football franchise begins with a classic “If you build it, they will come” moment, reminiscent of the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “Early in the twentieth century there was an unlikely—but epochal—sports-related moment from which all other such moments derived,” he writes. “It came when a small group of like-minded men with the apparent ability to see into the future devised plans for a stadium so large it would hold three times the largest crowd that had previously seen an Ohio State game.” Baskin follows Ohio State’s story from its primitive beginnings in the spring of 1890 (when it was, as the author puts it, a “Johnny Football-come-lately” when compared to other college teams) through a procession of its greatest founding figures. Readers meet coach Francis Schmidt, “a tall fellow wearing a bow tie” who had “the talent and the stage to go national with his razzle-dazzle.” They note that famed author James Thurber was a fervent Buckeye fan who wrote, “We give place to no man in our ardor for the game as it is played at Ohio State,” adding that football “has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes.” They introduce coach John Cooper, Ohio State’s “first administrator,” and, most notably, legendary coach Woody Hayes, “a tough guy with an egghead streak.” And always, in the background, there’s the game itself—always changing, becoming bigger business and bigger entertainment.

The authors follow the team’s story all the way to the present day and paint a masterful portrait of Buckeye Nation. The book’s pacing is skillful, refusing the temptation to hurry things along so that they might savor choice anecdotes and bits of dialogue. Their task is immensely aided by Kale’s illustrations, which crop up throughout—languid, sketchy pen-and-ink drawings of key figures that complement the text perfectly. But it’s the authors’ storytelling powers that carry the book and make it inviting reading, even for people who have no knowledge of and little interest in the sport. One key technique that assures this is a regular broadening of its scope from the specific (with many individual games dramatically reconstructed) to the general and even the ideological: “If ever a team had been favored by the gods, it was this one,” they write of the 2002 National Championship, keeping readers hooked into the grand story they’re telling. “The entire season was an old-fashioned movie serial that ended with a cliffhanger every Saturday.” Baskin and O’Bryant don’t shy away from play-by-play specifics, but they always draw readers into the drama and the passion of Ohio State football, and they do so with gusto. Even football newcomers will finish the book wishing that Baskin and O’Bryant would give other Big Ten schools the same terrific treatment.

A colorful and captivating account of a college football team’s defeats and glories.